The Politics of Historiography: The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen

All the episcopal lists of [Rouen] which were composed before the end of the eleventh century began with a certain Mellonus; little (or even nothing) was known about this saint, yet there was always complete agreement that he had flourished well after the era of Christian beginnings, perhaps as late as the early fourth century. The St. Ouen addition of Nigasius to the beginning of the episcopal list and the chronological placement of Nigasius in the apostolic era suddenly created a gaping hiatus between the authoritative apostolic age, when disciples of Sts. Peter and Paul (such as "Nigasius") wandered through Gaul spreading the Gospel, and the new beginnings of later centuries when figures such as Mellonus occupied the sees of the Roman Empire. There was, according to the historians of St. Ouen (and [Malm]édy), no unbroken chain of apostolic succession leading to the current occupant of the see of Rouen. Instead, the chain had clearly been ruptured after Nigasius. It is surely significant that the oldest extant manuscript of the passio Nigasii, the Malmédy copy now in Berlin, opens with biographies of Sts. Peter (fols. 1-10) and Paul (fols. 11-25) as the prelude to the biography of Nigasius, Quirinus and companions (fols. 26-44), followed by the account of the translation (the technical term for a relic transfer) of Quirinus's relics to Malmédy (fols. 45-53r) and of the miracles he performed there (fols. 53v-86). Peter's speech to the population of Rome, who gather for his crucifixion, centers on his gratitude to [Jesus Christ] for having taught him personally what to preach, something that cannot (according to Peter) be learned through books (fol. 7v-8r); Nigasius's own life story then begins precisely "Post uenerandam passionem beatissimorum Petri ac Pauli apostolorum..." (After the to-be-venerated passion of the most blessed apostles Peter and [Paul Fouracre]...) (fol. 31r). The early post-Jesus links in the apostolic chain are thus clearly emphasized, thereby underlining the historical inability to prolong the chain unbroken after Nigasius. Thus, celebrating the memory of Nigasius did not confer apostolic status on the see of Rouen; quite the contrary: it highlighted the fact that the see did not have apostolic status.
I do not mean either to denigrate the work of these authors or to imply that they are particularly or personally at fault in failing to traverse vast temporal expanses in order to make diachronic comparisons. The assumed disjunction between the "medieval" and the "modern" is professionally systemic and is reinforced at almost every turn; unfortunately, scholarly understanding does not always benefit from treating the "medieval" and the "modern" as non-converging parallel universes. Beyond the realm of scholarship, it has even been argued that actual events of recent history such as the Holocaust were in part a result of the way the "modern" has been conceptualized so as to obscure the continued importance of religion.(43) According to Dominick LaCapra, "modern" social and cultural forms are in many ways recycled versions of "medieval" practices, but the "religious" element of those practices (as a way of painting them as novel?) has been denied, repressed and displaced; however, that which is repressed only returns elsewhere, compulsively and in even more virulent forms, such as when the "modern" secular religion of Nazism included cults, rituals and ceremonies which were in effect displaced versions of earlier "medieval" constellations. We need hardly follow LaCapra's psychoanalytic orientation to the letter, or ascribe any causality as far as the Holocaust itself is concerned to the myth of the secular "modern," simply to recognize the existence of that myth, the fact that it is a myth, and the way it misleads scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century memorial practices.(44)